Trust, you’ll be equally comforted and discomforted by this collection from Toronto-based poet, English and Creative Writing professor, activist, and mama/baking queen—for real, she’s all the things!—Samantha Bernstein. In Kitchen Island Poems, Bernstein takes up some of the most prescient questions of our pandemic lives: is it real work to clean this table, mess it up, clean it again? should I have spent this time gaining more marketable skills? what kinds of poetry do children write every day? what kind of breading will we use when we eat the rich? and then, how rich, how delightfully rich, have we become in other ways? Equal parts come on in and please, leave me this space, this chapbook is twenty-eight gorgeous pages that will leave you just a little bit uneasy, but in the best, most productive, most political ways.

Printed in a limited run of fifty copies at Product Photo in Toronto, this chapbook is handbound by two editors, the author, and the author’s mother over glasses of wine at the kitchen table. Cover designed and chapbook typeset by Dani Spinosa, featuring this gorgeous photo of the poet’s for realsies kitchen island, taken by Jesse Pajuaar.